Video Marketers: Stop Using ‘Reach’ as the Go-to Metric

Video marketers don’t want to risk losing the support of some senior executives or potential clients who still believe the world of online video is as flat as the world of network television. Am I right? That’s why I secretly celebrated when I recently read that, “Next year will mark a major milestone for ad spending, as total digital surpasses TV for the first time”. In fact, while TV ad spend will total $7B in the US, digital ad spend is predicted to equal $77B. Now, YouTube reaches more 18 to 49 year olds than any cable TV, or broadcast network in the US, but should ‘reach’ be the only metric that continues to matter to the industry?

With the Digital Content NewsFronts kicking off in New York City this week, I think it’s time to stand up and publicly declare: The advertiser isn’t always right! But, he or she is still the one who pays you, right? So, if some brands and agencies are still spending too large a share of their total ad budgets on TV, then calling them “stupid” isn’t the smartest way to get these “Mad Men” and Women to spend even bigger bucks on digital video. A safer and savvier strategy is to quietly share some new ways of measuring the impact of video on their future success.

So, where can you find some of these strategic insights on where they can get their hands on certain critical data? Well, it turns out that some new ways of measuring the impact of video recently have emerged, so let’s take a look. First, Yahoo recently partnered with Nielsen & Hunter Qualitative to find out exactly what makes video ads effective, and their report yielded some strategic insights for video marketers:

Mobile alignment: According to Yahoo’s research, video ads must be optimized for screen alignment. In other words, viewing a landscape ad horizontally or a portrait ad vertically, compared to viewing a landscape ad vertically, can increase brand affinity 20% and 80% respectively. It can also lift purchase intent 33% and 100% respectively.

Auto-start native video ads: Compared to user-initiated video, this new research shows auto-start video ads in native environments achieve 51% higher aided recall, 10% higher brand familiarity, and 4% higher affinity. So if you aren’t testing native video, this year might be the time to start.

Facebook: Driving Business Objectives via Video

Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s COO confirmed that “People are sharing and creating nearly 3X more video on Facebook than they were a year ago”. Also, the amount of time people spend watching video content on Instagram has risen by 40% over the past 6 months. Last year, Facebook introduced a metric called Conversion Lift to measure how Facebook and Instagram campaigns drive business objectives like sales. So, has anyone used Conversion Lift to measure and improve their return on ad investments? Brands like Chase Bank have used the feature to measure campaigns.

‘Sales Lift’ Metric via YouTube TrueView

Now, if sharing all this critical data doesn’t help you win friends and influence people during the Digital Content NewsFronts, then it’s time to up your game and master the fine art of schmooze optimization. That’s when you whisper the following into the ear of a senior executive or potential client while you’re both waiting in line to get into YouTube Brandcast: “Do you want to see online video drive offline sales?” Let’s take a a look Inside AdWords to see how Google is helping brands with video metrics.

A certain brand measurement product manager at Google just put the word on the street that consumer packaged goods (CPG) companies, brands, advertisers, whatever, can get their hands on sales lift studies in the US – for free – if they just happen to be using TrueView video ads. Seriously, you can’t make this stuff up. According to my sources, 78% of the TrueView campaigns that they studied on YouTube showed an increase in offline sales. How much of an increase? Well, 61% drove a “statistically significant” lift in sales of the advertised brand, according to people who oughta know.

Now, according to some wise guys and gals, one campaign they measured – I think it was Gatorade’s “We Love Sweat” – earned $13.50 sales in return for every dollar spent on TrueView. Now, that’s a hell of a return on ad spend, or ROAS, as they’d say on Madison Avenue. Also, Mars tested a video that opened with some very strong corporate branding, against one that used branding at the end, and confirmed that using branding at the beginning drove nearly 7x greater sales lift.

You might say that this new sales lift offering drops the last piece into place for full funnel measurement of CPG campaigns on YouTube. So, we just might want to talk with some of the Google people who most certainly will be hanging around YouTube Brandcast. I understand that they plan to scale these studies. So, it won’t hurt to see if they’ll cut us in on the action. Who know, we might pick up some strategic insights into how online video can drive offline sales for our brand.

If brands are looking for deeper ways to measure video engagement, Tubular Labs has recently launched Tubular Video Ratings, which provides you with a standardized metric that rates every digital video, publisher, and influencer according to views and engagement. This seems to be the first time that engagement and views for video content (not ads) have been benchmarked across the entire video ecosystem, which new way to measure the success of branded entertainment, media sales, and influencer marketing.

The Tubular Video Rating now scores 100 Million videos as well as 5 Million brands and influencers. And it covers videos uploaded to YouTube, Facebook, and Vine, and enables video marketers to rate their video content against competitors, categories, and peers to see how they stack up in terms of views and engagement. To learn more about these new Tubular Video Ratings, just click here.